Someone explain what a namecoin is, how it is used, and why would we need them. A cursory glance at that wiki says they are used for DNS, but then you go and list DNS servers people can freely connect to? What am I missing here.

Hehe, been mining solo these last days, still quite feasible but I was kinda waiting for something like this. I wasn't able to get in early for generating Bitcoins, perhaps I can do it for the Namecoin, I've always been wanting to have my own addresses, too, anyway...

Someone explain what a namecoin is, how it is used, and why would we need them. A cursory glance at that wiki says they are used for DNS, but then you go and list DNS servers people can freely connect to? What am I missing here.

I recently rewrote the pool software to handle more load. You can still withdraw from the old pool account and I'll automatically withdraw the remaining amounts next week to those that haven't withdrawn. The new pool is operating at the same URL and port. Withdrawals from the old pool are available at http://oldpool.bitparking.com/pool. If you have any questions let me know.

The errors are due to the long poller having problems. What's happening is there's so much computing power on the namecoin network right now, and difficulty hasn't adjusted yet, that blocks are being solved every 2 minutes or so. With the thousands of long polling clients it's taking longer than this to notify them of a new block. So multiple blocks go by before you get the notification. At some point the long poller server locks up. Things will calm down in a day or so when difficulty adjusts to match the network speed.